When James was a small child, his mother, who holds a BA from Austin College, illustrated several comic books about his life, and repeatedly took him to museums and galleries throughout North Texas. These experiences likely led to James's love of viewing, creating, and participating in various forms of art. In elementary school, James won a ribbon for a watercolor painting about his home, and he drew pictures of cartoon characters for his friends throughout Junior High. His juvenile artistic output tapered off during High School, as he turned to literature as an outlet for his creative impulses, though he never completely abandoned visual expression.

In 1998, James returned to visual art with a renewed sense of exitement and experimentation. While working at a bookstore, James made his first series of paintings (thirty abstract works made of dust, ink, and solvents on shop towels) and a number of sculptures and collages. In 1999 he began a series of investigations into tromp l'oeil painting techniques and featuring Cinder Blocks in various locations and guises. This series evolved into an exploration of the essential aspects of cinder blocks and other types of brick. It quickly became apparent that the cinder blocks are essentially planar forms with and negative space, and this realization led to a series of tumbling block works, loosely reminiscent of the Q-Bert game board, and related to color field abstraction. In 2003, at the urging of his mother and a few artist friends, he left Texas to pursue a Bachelors Degree in Painting and Graphic Design at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

In addition to numerous academic paintings and prints, James worked on and completed several series of paintings while living in Springfield. The first, 8 paintings exploring Tetris, came directly from James's tumbling block works, led directly to a lengthy series of works that followed Mario (of the Nintendo video games) through various escapades, culminating in an altarpiece that paid homage to 8- and 16-bit video graphics. James continues to produce a variety of artworks and is currently working, albeit slowly, on a series of Icon paintings. You can view many of James's artworks by following the tabs above.

The Mario Veda, a series of works executed between March of 2004 and May of 2006, illustrates an evolution in James's intellectual and emotional development, and represents the self knowledge he gained while living in Springfield, Illinois. Initially a reference to a set of characters from video games on the Nintendo platform, the characters quickly evolved, becoming stand-ins for particular situations and experiences. We leave the particulars to your imagination.

This short series of paintings, executed in the Spring of 2005, was inspired by the Abstraktes Bild series of paintings by Gerhard Richter. James used a set of putty knives to apply thin layers of acrylic paint to dry-erase marker board, resulting in the illusion of depth and creating a striking luminous effect.

Wax On/Wax Off: a method of practicing a particular punch blocking technique that was developed by the fictional martial arts master Kesuke Miyagi; also a series of paintings James executed in June and July of 2005. He silkscreened wooden panels with one of three patterns which he later covered with encaustic (a mixture of oil paint or construction chalk, beeswax and paraffin). In the triptychs, the patterns symbolize three responses to questions posed in the title of the work: yes, maybe, no.

Below, and in no particular order, you'll find a selection of miscellaneous works by James, covering his earliest artistic endeavors (the Fibonacci Lamp), his academic career at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and a current series of Iconographic paintings.